PILLSBURY JOUSTS WITH STATUS QUO

Amy PagnozziTHE HARTFORD COURANT

Even if he should succeed in his quixotic attempt to unseat six-time U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro in the state's reconfigured Third District, it would be awkward to call the man who inspired Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip Congressman Pillsbury.

Charlie Pillsbury's lack of affect is such that almost everywhere he's been somebody's refused his campaign literature, saying, as one woman did Sunday, "I don't need that, I'm already voting for him."

"Well, I'm 'him' and thank you so much because I really appreciate your support," Charlie responded, delighted by his anonymity -- a sign that supporters resonate to his positions on the issues rather than who he is.

Funny, what a difference a few months of campaigning can make.

When Charlie first confided to me that he was considering a challenge to DeLauro, a Democrat, his motivation was to rattle the perennial incumbent's gilded cage. Increasingly, DeLauro's positions typified those of the Democratic Party, in the sense of being difficult to differentiate from those of the GOP.

Charlie, with little or nothing to risk, felt no need to play it politically safe by, say, cozying up to corporations and accepting political action committee money to fatten his campaign chest.

After all, campaign finance reform looms as large or larger on the Green agenda than environmental issues. It's a quite sensible position because, until it's achieved, elected officials shall never again act by and for We the People. But the issue is not quite sexy, the supposed reason why campaign finance reform has never caught fire with the public.

To his delight, the people he met along the campaign trail were as sick of the status quo as he was, even if he often found himself having to explain what a Green was -- not that Charlie's your typical Green.

Example: Departing from most in his party, Charlie repeatedly and enthusiastically endorsed Democrat Bill Curry's challenge to John Rowland for the governor's seat even though he opposes Democrats and Republicans as a whole.

He was downright astonished that declaring opposition to both mainstream parties turned out to be an infallible cue for applause and even hoots of approbation!

That fire for reform, that's what transformed Charlie from a symbolic challenger to DeLauro into an actual contender for her congressional seat, which was also sought by Republican and fellow Yale alumnus Richter Elser.

For or against, you have to admire the guy for his "Take No Prisoners" consistency on the issues.

On Sunday evening, at the West Haven Islamic Center adjacent to the University of New Haven, where he was invited primarily to discuss his views on the Middle East, he stuck to the same script he'd two weeks before used at Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden.

Unlike Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush, Charlie refuses "to speak out of both sides of my mouth. I decided I wanted to be even-handed."

He's flamed all three leaders and their respective governments in most certain terms.

From the get-go, he opposed going to war against Iraq, denouncing the Bush administration's "violence and greed."

(I mean, besides the minute fraction of the population who still sit atop the economic and political pecking order to whose droppings we have become inured, having endured them for so long.)

And yet these seemingly permanent superpowers are absolutely on point in their instinct to fight every challenge tooth and nail.

Because with every rare breath of fresh air -- every Wellstone, every McCain, every Pillsbury -- we begin to regain our senses.

The Greens? It's the only political party that's growing instead of shrinking. So if Green is all Charlie should ever remain, that's OK.

As Charlie says on his website, www.pillsburyforcongress.org, through the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, respectively:

"A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling our differences is not just.'... A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."